Research and Publications Database

The NRFSN research and publications database leads users to regionally relevant fire science. There are nearly 4,000 documents, which have been carefully categorized by the NRFSN to highlight topics and ecosystems important in the Northern Rockies Region. Categorized resources include records from the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), Fire Research and Management Exchange System (FRAMES), and Fire Effects Information System (FEIS).

Note: Additional Northern Rockies fire research is available from our Webinar & Video Archive, which provides access to webinars, videos, podcasts, and seminars.

Hints: By default, the Search Terms box reads and searches for terms as if there were AND operators between them. To search for one or more terms, use the OR operator. Use quotation marks around phrases or to search for exact terms. To maximize the search function, use the Search Terms box for other information (e.g. author(s), date, species of interest, additional fire topics) together with the topic, ecosystem, and/or resource type terms from the lists. Additional information is available in our documents on topics, ecosystems, and types.

An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western USA remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway. We used General Land Office survey reconstructions from the late-1800s across 11...

Mulching fuels treatments have been increasingly implemented by forest managers in the western USA to reduce crown fire hazard. These treatments use heavy machinery to masticate or chip unwanted shrubs and small-diameter trees and broadcast the mulched material on the ground. Because mulching treatments are relatively novel and have...

Fuel treatments in ponderosa pine forests of the northern Rocky Mountains are commonly used to modify fire behavior, but it is unclear how different fuel treatments impact the subsequent production and distribution of aboveground biomass, especially in the long term. This research evaluated aboveground biomass responses 23 years...

We modeled the normal fire environment for occurrence of large forest wildfires (>40 ha) for the Pacific Northwest Region of the United States. Large forest wildfire occurrence data from the recent climate normal period (1971-2000) was used as the response variable and fire season precipitation, maximum temperature, slope,...

Since 2009, the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service has promoted an “all lands approach” to forest restoration, particularly relevant in the context of managing wildfire. To characterize its implementation, we undertook an inventory of what we refer to as fire-focused all lands management (ALM) projects, defined as projects...

Interest in PNW forests is shifting from a focus on old-growth forests alone to include the ecological value and processes of early-seral communities. However, focusing on the alpha and omega states of a linear successional model does not account for the suite of conditions derived from mixed-severity fire common in many forests....

The effect of topography on wildfire distribution in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of debate. We suspect the size of the study area, and the assumption fire return intervals are distributed as a Weibull distribution used in many previous studies may have obscured the real effect of topography on these fire-regulated...

Climate change is projected to exacerbate the intensity of heat waves and drought, leading to a greater incidence of large and high-intensity wildfires in forested ecosystems. Predicting responses of seedlings to such fires requires a process-based understanding of how the energy released during fires affects plant physiology and...

Early-seral forests are expanding throughout western North America as fire frequency and annual area burned increase, yet fire behaviour in young postfire forests is poorly understood. We simulated fire behaviour in 24-year-old lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) stands in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States...

Ecological restoration treatments are being implemented at an increasing rate in ponderosa pine and other dry conifer forests across the western United States, via the USDA Forest Service’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) program. In this program, collaborative stakeholder groups work with National Forests (NFs) to...